Co-organizer of EA Hamburg
Studying for M.Sc. in Energy Technology
B.Sc. in Mechanical Engineering
Worked as research assistant while studying
Was part of TU Hamburgās Formula Student team for one season
Trained as a mechanic
After studying, I want to work on alternative protein.
I did, but I must confess that it wasnāt for me. For some reason I found it really annoying to hear the two AI voices so often talk about their reactions or how they āfeltā about a particular part of the book. I already find it annoying when humans do that instead of talking about the actual topic but when AIs fake that to appear more human like I find it quite irritating.
Sorry, I meant to write āideas are more uncomfortable when they are newā. Not because.
Since you wrote āforceā, I assumed youād be uncomfortable.
Yes, that is what I meant.
Ok, so your point is that ideas are more uncomfortable when they are new and when I already heard them, Iāll find them less uncomfortable?
Not yet. To give the podcast the best chance, Iāll start with a book summary that I think Iāll enjoy. Once Iāve finished it, Iāll decide how to proceed.
I am not sure what your point is regarding encountering those opinions in the wild. After listening to the book summary, it doesnāt get easier to control how long I immerse myself in this in a conversation. But I donāt think that is what you mean.
On your website you say that your goal with this project is to enable people to have their own informed opinion about a book so that they donāt just repeat headlines. This is obviously a good thing, but I was skimming through the list of books and I must admit that for some my first reaction was āok, youāll need to duraniumman that authorās position to make me update my uninformed opinion on that book!ā Of course, it is important to have a strong foundation on which to base a strong disagreement with a view. I am just not sure if I can force myself through it.
What is your view on this: If I rate the chance that my more informed view will be different to my less informed view very low and the chance that the experience will make me angry and sad very high, is it then worth doing?
I want to be able to engage with opinions that I disagree with but for some opinions I find this very challenging. I am often wondering about how hard I should push myself here. Any thoughts on that?
I donāt have a ChatGPT subscription. If I stop using their free tier, I think this has two effects: It benefits them because they can spend less resources on inference and it hurts them because investors lose trust in them. Do you think the expected net effect is positive or negative? Should I stop using their free tier if I want to protest against OpenAI?
Also, I noticed that I can check multiple boxes on https://āāquitgpt.org/āā and only one of them is āI cancelled my subscriptionā. If I understand the footnote below the number displayed at the top (currently 1,200,000) correctly, it counts everyone who checked any of the boxes. I would be more curious about how high the number of only the people is, who canceled their subscription or commit to not paying for ChatGPT in the future.
Update: The Venue has changed. We will meet at Gunnarās place (address above).
The first four slides work now but unfortunately when I continue to the fifth slide, I get an error again.
Edit: It looks like that issue was now also fixed. Thanks :)
Is the problem on my side or is it also broken for others?
We have an e-mail address that people can use to contact us. That is used for communication with new people until they come to their first event where they can join the Signal group.
Creating a new group every year sounds like something that might work, but it might also lead to some confusion. For example, if you try to find something someone wrote a while back. Iāll think about it. Thanks for the idea.
To prevent bots and too many inactive accounts, we only add people to our local groupās Signal chat that we have met in person or that someone already knows. Also, remember that you can reset the invite link. This can help when you get overrun by bots.
I think it makes sense to make it not too easy for people to get access to the group chat so that it feels private and personal, so people are less shy about writing there.
We still need a good way of handling the problem of inactive accounts in the Signal group. If a person turned up only once three years ago, maybe they no longer need to be in the group. But what is a good way of having an overview, which accounts can be removed and which canāt? Especially one that has as little overhead as possible. Does any of you have any Ideas about that? How do you handle this?
We currently have about 90 accounts in our group chat and maybe 20 or so people that actually write stuff in there and that come to events. Iād like to bring these two numbers closer together, so new people donāt think they write to 90 people when something like 70 of them will probably never read it.
Nice, thanks for updating your post with the additional data. But I think there is an error in the new graph. The bars for Founders Pledge are in the color of Longview Philanthropy and the bars for Longview Philanthropy seem to be missing.
(edit: no longer true, post has been updated to fix this)
There is also this post by Luke Moore and Sjir Hoeijmakers. They only compare 2023 and 2024, but they have also included funding data for Founders Pledge, Logview Philantropy, Macroscopic Ventures and a lot of smaller funders/āgrantmakers/āevaluators/āfundraisers. And they calculated that when including all of those, funding has actually increased. Mainly because of more funding through Founders Pledge and Navigation Fund.
A follow-up of his post with newer number is now available: https://āāwww.astralcodexten.com/āāp/āātech-pacs-are-closing-in-on-the-almonds
Thanks for the post. I am also currently sending out applications and encouraging messages like this are highly appreciated right now.
I found that linked post from Scott Alexander quite interesting, but it seems like the numbers are no longer up to date. The paper he cites is from 2003. I think the political landscape has changed quite a bit since then. If I had to guess, Iād say political donations have become larger. It would be interesting to see more recent figures and if these are still small for their impact.
This is just an intuition of mine, and not thoroughly researched, but it seems to me that if we consider all sentient beings, there are many possible futures in which the average well-being would be below neutral, and some of them, especially for non-human animals, would be quite easily preventable. This leads me to believe that marginal resources are currently better invested in preventing future suffering than in reducing the risk of extinction.
Just a minor correction: The author of āThe world is much better. The world is awful. The world can be much better.ā is Max Roser, not Mark Roser.
Thanks for this post. I especially found your point on treating the post-FTX challenge as a trust problem valuable. I always had a slightly bad feeling about this trend of trying to minimize reputational risks and distancing oneself from stuff that others might find controversial. After reading your post I have now more clarity regarding that.
Focussing on outward appearance comes with the risk of losing intellectual honesty and might not even be very effective at improving outward appearance as it is only treating the symptoms and might even seem deceptive or as if we had something to hide. I am not saying that one shouldnāt care about outward appearance at all, but maybe it shouldnāt be the main focus of dealing with the post-FTX challenge but rather thinking about it as a trust problem should be. The main priority should be to ensure that our community is worthy of our trust and that it creates value. I am aware that this is already happening to some degree, and I am not sure if it is possible to judge how much of it is by looking how much is publicly talked about it is, but if it is then outward appearance of EA is currently too much of a focus and making sure that EA is trustworthy, honest and true to its principles maybe deserves a little more attention.
Having a community worthy of our trust and one that is true to its original principles gets harder the larger the community gets, and it also gets harder when the community grows faster. I get the point that growing slower comes at a cost and more good can be done with a larger community but when slower growth means a healthier community that exists in a meaningful way for longer, then maybe that is a price we should be willing to pay.
Duncan Sabienās āMake more Grayspacesā is also interesting in this context. It describes a possible solution for how a growing community can stay true to its values. I am not sure if this solution would work for EA, but I found the description of the problem quite compelling.